Hey again! The days
are going so fast now, it is unbelievable.
Last Monday was ok, but man, email is not fun nowadays—super trunky
stuff, like Alex getting married, finalizing student housing arrangements for
rooming with Elder Armatage, and scheduling classes for fall semester at
BYU. Ay!
I don’t like thinking about this.
It’s so distracting! Oh well… On Monday President Espinosa had us over to
meet the less active he’s been fellowshipping.
His name is Marlon and he’s a super good guy! He has a couple of kids who aren’t baptized,
so we’ll see about that! President
Espinosa is the man. He works so hard! Tuesday was alright! We had a new investigator named Gener, who
just graduated from high school (the end of the school year is in March
here). He’s nice, just quiet. We taught a couple new investigators that my
comp taught while we were on exchanges.
One, Jomel, has a lot of promise and he really understood the
Restoration, but his problem is that he’s super busy. We taught Lourdes the Gospel of Jesus Christ
lesson and it went really well. We
brought her friend Loui (a member) and his example helped her see herself being
baptized one day.
Wednesday…Man, Wednesday was one of the toughest days of my
mission. It all started at district
meeting when my companion and I, the two members of the Mission Leadership
Council, were the only ones who did not have any investigators with goals for
baptism in the month of April. That got
me thinking. I just felt frustrated and
inadequate. I feel like I’ve been trying
so hard to do everything right but we just aren’t seeing the results. I talked with my companion about it before we
went out that day, but I was still kind of down. Work didn’t help a lot. We taught Al, but after that everyone wasn’t
around or they hid from us, or they told us to try another day. We didn’t really try to find new people
because we were just running from appointment to appointment and back-up plan
to back-up plan and they were all rejections.
We did end up teaching Nora and Allan in the evening, but man, that was
a rough day. Thursday we had exchanges
and Elder Surio came back with me to my area and man, God is good. Something like this happened in the MTC when
my companion was feeling down, when we had a practice teaching with two
hilarious young men that cheered him right up.
Well, we talked with this crazy, sarcastic old guy on the jeepney, and
he was SO funny! He said that the
missionaries came to his house once and he tried to give them coffee and when
they declined he told them to leave and not to come back! We asked if he would let the missionaries
come back now and he said he would as long as they drank his coffee; he would
have them over every day if they would drink the coffee! We were laughing pretty hard. And that cheered me right up and Thursday was
a much better day!
On Thursday we got to teach JR, Michelle, Lorry (the less
active grandmother of our recent convert Harvey) and Al came with us to Aguso
and referred his best friend there to us!
Good day. When Elder Delante and
I met back on Friday for weekly planning, we both had felt inspired to drop our
current investigators and switch our area of focus, so that’s what we are going
to do this week! Friday was another good
day. We taught Gener, who is still doing
ok, and we taught Al the word of wisdom, which he wants to live! We taught Ami about being an example to
Marvin, and we ended the night by teaching the Victorios.
Saturday was an interesting day… We taught 4 lessons, but
literally not one of them was on our plan or our back-up plan! This is another evidence that we need to
change our area of focus. We had a new
investigator, Carlo, who was good and had good questions, but got quiet when we
got to the actual Restoration with the first vision. He just silently nodded at the baptismal
invitation. Oh well, we’ll see! We also taught Kevin, our 7th Day
Adventist friend, who had tons of questions about the Sabbath and dietary laws,
to which we bore testimony that all of our interpretations come from living
prophets and continuing revelation. No
one really has much to say about that.
Sunday was good, as Marlon came to church and so did Harvey and
Lorry! Our visit was not in vain! Allan still came and another one of our less
active neighbors came as well! No
investigators came, but a steady stream of less actives are coming back. We had our new ward mission leader, Brother
Evangelista, work with us and man, is he excited! We taught Gener again, then Jomel, who had
some authenticity questions about the Book of Mormon. We taught Allan Victorio, who is doing
great. We visited the Ongs, who told us
about some terrorist plane crash? I don’t
know, completely unplugged here. Lastly,
we went back to the Garcia family who had invited a less active family over for
the lesson and refreshments! Overall, a
good week. Patience and faith tried?
Yes, but valuable lessons were learned, and I’m just happy to serve my king.
Love you all!
Elder Christensen
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